Turning Japanese

1 July, 2018

I’d like to apologise in advance for the jingoist nature of this post. I also realise that the people in the photo above are Chinese rather than Japanese*.

You’ve probably seen the adverts on the telly for 23andMe – it’s all the rage at the moment; tracing your genealogy. A few years ago ancestry was the thing to research online (as well as pornography of course). The service has been around for a few years now and is quite costly, but I thought it might be quite interesting to see what the results would be for me. If nothing else, it might be a giggle to have it confirmed with scientific evidence that I am in actual fact, 90% Japanese – and find out once and for all, why I look like Bjork.

The process is quite simple; you deposit some saliva into a plastic receptacle and post it back to a laboratory in the Netherlands to be analysed. Then after around 6 weeks they send you your results online, depicted in various reports and charts. This costs about £120. Yes. They charge you more than a hundred quid to gob into a tube, then take the piss out of you by making up some ridiculous facts about you. You are three quarters Nigerian so you are 75% likely to be a traffic warden. That sort of thing.

I won’t bore you with the science behind this (mainly because I don’t understand it) – but basically your DNA consists of 23 pairs of chromosomes which defines your ancestry composition and other characteristics and traits.

What prompted me to take the plunge and fork out a hundred notes on a DNA test? Well aside from English and Irish roots, I have also been told by family members that I have gypsy and Jewish blood mingled in. I also have suspiciously slitty eyes – which could indicate some sort of oriental or Mongolian blend in there too.

I had feared that the outcome returned would be a single word printed in capital letters on a folded piece of paper: “NONSE“, but the results were actually far more mundane than that. It told me a few facts that I already know; I am probably right-handed, I am probably bald and I am likely to have green eyes. I am also highly likely to weigh less than other people of a similar height, and probably don’t sleep as much at night as other folks do. Quite accurate considering this was predicted from a bit of my spit.

Reassuringly – although not necessary medically accurate – I am less likely to develop Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s in the future. In fact it gave be a clean bill of health genetically, which was a relief. A lot of people apparently opt out of receiving their health reports – but sod it I thought, in for a penny, in for a pound. This also means that I probably won’t produce any midget children, which I would certainly train to be evil.

Now for the big question: where does Tom Fog hail from, gentically? I had secretly hoped to be a Russian, but alas, no. I am 100% bona fide European. Here’s the breakdown:

74.8 British & Irish
9.8 French & German
3.7 Scandanavian

(The French genes would account for me being a coward and the reason I loved watching Eurotrash as a teenager. And the German genes explain why I’m a bit of a cunt).

Not a single scrap of brown stranger exists in my genetic makeup, so it’s a mystery why I look like Fu Manchu. I’ve included the link to my ancestry DNA report here.